DHi Speaker Series Events

Digital innovations have been contributing to dramatic revisions in the practices of teaching, research, and publications in disciplines in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences for at least the past five years. And whilst the implications of such innovations may have once remained marginal—especially to humanities disciplines—they are becoming ever more pervasive. These changes go far beyond the effects of social media and new devices.

Using the digital Whitman Archive as a case study and a departure point, Professor Belasco will discuss how digital methodologies are prompting major shifts in professional practice in the humanities. Some of the questions she will explore are: How do new technologies change our traditional notions of scholarship? What does publication mean in a digital environment? How are digital environments prompting new genres of scholarly production? How do we evaluate digital publications?

Scholars in the arts and humanities, and in fact the everyday reader, spend time working toward understanding text, often by examining it through an interpretative lens. A postcolonial reading, for instance, will typically provide insights that are distinct from those of a feminist reading or a new historical reading.

Alongside the griffins and unicorns in medieval bestiaries frequently appears a fascinating but somewhat less notorious hybrid: the ant-lion, a creature with a magisterial feline head and an industrious, formican body.

Scholars in many disciplines are bringing new dimensions to their research and teaching by looking at the Humanities from a geographical perspective. This talk highlights the use of geographic information systems (GIS), and spatial inquiry more generally, as methods and modes of thinking that are changing historical scholarship.

The NYPL has built a toolkit at maps.nypl.org that enables the study of the historical landscapes. Utilizing these tools, the general public and scholarly community alike, can create powerful juxtapositions of old and new maps that both highlight and answer spatial questions. Furthermore, users can transcribe static images of historical maps into mashable datasets, unlocking the potential for new modes of historical and geographical inquiry and data visualization. During this talk, Mr. Knutzen will demonstrate, highlight and present use cases for maps.nypl.org.

In the book How to Lie with Maps Mark Monmonier claims that “a good map tells a multitude of little white lies; it suppresses truth to help the user see what needs to be seen. Reality is three-dimensional, rich in detail, and far too factual to allow a complete yet uncluttered two-dimensional graphic scale model. Indeed a map that did not generalize would be useless.” Maps are just one type of representation in a rapidly growing field of information visualization, evident by the popularity of websites such as the following:

Digital Technology has revolutionized many sectors of our society in the brief three decade history of widespread use of personal computing and the internet, and yet higher education has been typically conservative and slow to assimilate the revolutionary implications of these new capacities. As a collective, and as individuals, we in higher education are quick to shift rhetoric but painfully slow to shift practices.